General Wojciech Jaruzelski was Poland's last Cold War autocrat and came to be
considered both ruthless and pragmatic, a traitor and a patriot

General Wojciech Jaruzelski,, who has died aged 90, was Poland’s last Communist-era ruler and the most controversial figure in his country’s recent history.

Regarded throughout his career as a pragmatist, Jaruzelski was defence minister under Wladyslaw Gomulka in 1970 when orders were given to Polish troops to shoot shipyard workers who were striking over food price rises in the northern port cities of Gdansk, Gdynia, Szczecin and Elblag. Forty-four people were killed and more than 1,000 injured, 200 of them seriously.

Jaruzelski took over as prime minister of Poland in 1981, when he imposed martial law and suppressed the anti-Communist Solidarity movement. Thousands of Solidarity activists were interned, and several dozen killed in clashes with police or assassinated by secret agents.

Jaruzelski in later life

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But Jaruzelski, who described himself as a “Polish patriot”, denied responsibility for the 1970 killings and later maintained that martial law was justified to forestall an imminent Soviet invasion. Many Poles also conceded that, although he fought hard to maintain Communist Party rule, Jaruzelski reacted to the transition to democracy with good grace.

In early 1989 he went against many of the hardliners within his party to press for “round-table” talks with Solidarity aimed at devising some form of power-sharing. The partially-free parliamentary elections of that year ended in victory for Solidarity, and within three months Poland had the first non-Communist government to be formed in Eastern Europe for more than 40 years.

Inscrutable behind the dark glasses which he wore because of a medical condition, Jaruzelski remained an enigma, some Poles viewing him as a patriot and others as a traitor. Yet perhaps the most puzzling aspect of his story was how a boy from a respectable Polish Catholic family who had spent time in a Soviet labour camp had come to embrace Communism in the first place.

Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski was born on July 6 1923 into a Roman Catholic family of landed gentry with strong associations with Poland’s cavalry regiments. Brought up in Kurow, near the eastern city of Lublin, he attended a Jesuit school regarded as a training ground for the sons of Poland’s elite.

Following the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939, hordes of Poles were forcibly transported to Soviet Russia. Jaruzelski, then 16, was put to work in the coal mines of Kazakhstan while his parents were sent to labour camps in Siberia — he never saw them again.

Yet Jaruzelski became a fervent Communist and, by 1943 (the same year his father died in captivity), was training to be an officer in a Red Army school. He was commissioned into the army of General Zygmunt Berling, a Polish unit formed under Soviet command to fight the Nazis, who had reneged on the non-aggression pact and invaded Russia in 1941.

Jaruzelski took part in the siege of Warsaw and its subsequent capture, and went on to fight in the battle for Berlin. Back in Poland, he was involved in hunting down bands of anti-Communist guerrillas who refused to surrender. He was sent to the general army staff academy in Warsaw in 1948 and graduated after three years with honours. He also joined the Polish United Workers’ Party — the country’s Communist party. In 1956, at the age of 33, he became the youngest brigadier-general in the army.

Jaruzelski entered the Polish parliament in 1961, and the next year was appointed deputy defence minister and promoted to the post of armed forces’ chief political commissar. In 1968 he was made defence minister with the rank of a three-star general. That year, when Warsaw Pact forces, led by Soviet tanks, invaded Czechoslovakia, Jaruzelski sent a Polish contingent to help suppress the uprising.

Two years later, in 1970, unrest had moved to Poland. Trouble began before Christmas , when the government announced a huge rise in the cost of food, provoking strikes focused around the country’s northern shipyards. Although most historians believe that the order to use force against the strikers probably came from Gomulka, Jaruzelski’s role remained unclear. He is said to have told Gomulka that he would not allow troops to be used against civilians; but tanks and soldiers were deployed, and as defence minister he was directly responsible. There is no evidence that he defied instructions, and he did not resign in protest.

The year 1970 was a turning point in Polish history. It marked the end of Gomulka’s regime and became an emotional rallying point for protesters. When, in 1980, worker unrest exploded again under Gomulka’s successor, Edward Gierek, one of the key demands of the Gdansk strikers was that the government should erect a monument to those who had been killed in 1970.

To begin with, the Gierek government’s response to the new crisis was to negotiate. Championed by Solidarity, workers were granted the right to strike and promised higher pay and improved social benefits. The crisis eased, but in 1981 government delay in introducing promised reforms provoked fresh disturbances; and, with its leadership in disarray, the Polish government chose Jaruzelski as its fourth prime minister within a year.

It was a gesture intended to demonstrate to Moscow that authorities in Warsaw were still in control of the situation, and Jaruzelski acted fast, producing a 10-point programme for economic recovery based on an appeal for a three-month period without strikes, which won support from the Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and from Roman Catholic priests. But the three-month moratorium was ignored. A strike of textile workers in the city of Lodz set off industrial unrest across the country. In September 1981 Jaruzelski received a blunt order from the Kremlin to take “radical steps” to crush anti-Soviet groups. On December 13, after further abortive negotiations, he declared martial law. He headed the military council which suspended Solidarity and ordered the arrest of its leaders, including Lech Walesa.

In a televised broadcast Jaruzelski explained that extremist elements had driven Poland to “the edge of the abyss”. The measures he had imposed were designed to save the country from civil war, and once the national situation had returned to normal they would be removed. He denied that he had acted on instructions from Moscow, but he was given a hero’s welcome when he visited the Soviet capital in March 1982.

After Western sanctions, and under pressure from the Pope (who appealed to the general as a fellow-Pole), Jaruzelski eased some of the restrictions and soon released the Solidarity leaders. Martial law was lifted in July 1983, with promises of a general election in 1984. They were not held, however, until 1985, when Jaruzelski resigned as prime minister to take over the post of president, with a civilian, Zbignien Messmer, appointed to the premiership.

But in 1988 Poland experienced another wave of crippling strikes. Faced with a severe economic crisis and encouraged by the new face in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jaruzelski’s ministers announced that they were ready to end their boycott of Walesa and include him in “round table” talks on the country’s future.

Most Poles accepted that Jaruzelski fought a hard battle to persuade his colleagues to sit down with Solidarity and gave him credit for not sabotaging the process when the talks led to elections in June 1989, which the Communists lost. “Some people didn’t want to accept the election result,” he admitted. “But trying to stop Solidarity taking power after the election would have [been] like trying to stand in front of a car going at 100 miles an hour.” Narrowly re-elected president in 1989 by a parliament that included members of Solidarity, Jaruzelski resigned his Communist party posts. The following year he stepped down early, paving the way for Walesa to be elected in his place.

Out of office, Jaruzelski found himself the subject of investigations concerning the 1970 killings, the imposition of martial law and the disappearance of thousands of Central Committee files. Apart from occasional appearances before investigating tribunals, he kept a low profile and spent much of his early retirement ensconced in his modest Warsaw villa writing his memoirs, Why Martial Law? (1993). The book quickly became a bestseller, and Jaruzelski’s popularity soared. An opinion poll in 1995 showed that 54 per cent of Poles considered martial law to have been a correct decision.

By this time, too, Poles had become disenchanted by the eccentric presidency of Lech Walesa, and in the 1995 presidential elections the former Communist Aleksander Kwasniewski swept to power. “There is now a chance for real understanding,” a delighted Jaruzelski told an interviewer. “But instead of triumphalism on one side and a feeling of defeat on the other, there must be a prevailing sense that democracy won.”

Jaruzelski continued to regard himself as a man of the Left, and was scornful of former comrades who started ostentatiously going to church. Yet in 2003 he announced his support for Poland’s membership of the EU as an “act of patriotism”. “I see no moral contradiction here,” he said. “We were once in the Soviet sphere of influence and had to live with it. This was the historical logic. Joining the West is now best for Poland.”

After years of legal wrangling and delays, Jaruzelski finally appeared in court in 2000 to answer charges of ordering the shooting of striking shipyard workers in 1970. The trial was expected to last 30 years. In 2006 he was charged by the Institute of National Remembrance on two counts relating to abuses during his time in office, but he pleaded ill health and avoided appearing in court.

According to several reports, though, he was still fit enough to be caught, earlier this year, in a “compromising position” with his nurse, several decades his junior. “If my husband does not get rid of that woman I will file for divorce,” noted Jaruzelski’s enraged 84-year-old wife, Barbara.